Emily R. Brink

In every issue for the past eleven years, Reformed Worship has included a set of "Songs for the Season," formerly called "Hymn of the Month." The criteria for selecting those songs include choosing something accessible to children, something old and something new, something based on a psalm, and something fitting for the particular season of the Christian year.

As a teenager, Barry Liesch was fascinated by jazz, learned to improvise at the piano by imitating others, started transcribing music from recordings, and became a skilled piano accompanist, even going on tent crusades in his native British Columbia. His church gave him a music scholarship to a Bible college, something family circumstances would not have permitted. He continued his studies, earning a doctorate in music theory, and for the past twenty years has taught at Biola University in Loma Linda, California.

Have you ever filled put one, of those product cards in a card pack or magazine? I ordered a catalog from "Banner Media Services," hoping to get some new banner ideas for use in worship. But the word banner was used in quite a different way than I expected; the company was marketing audiovisual equipment. More catalogs followed from different companies that mysteriously got my address; they offered a dizzying array of sound boards, microphones, video systems, "cassette ministry" systems, and more.

This past June, my home congregation learned that we would be losing one of our two pastors, the adult choir director, and the organist. They all left for good and different reasons. But the joy of Pentecost Sunday was muted when I heard that day that all three would be leaving.

The Sunday after Pentecost is often called Trinity Sunday in recognition that all three persons of the Trinity have now been remembered and celebrated in the great festivals of the Christian year. From now until Advent, we enter the long "Ordinary Time" or "Trinity Season" as some churches call it.

Last summer Pastor Anduwatju was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the site of the 1996 meeting of the Reformed Ecumenical Council a group that includes thirty denominations in twenty-one countries. During a break in the meetings, I had the opportunity to meet him and learn something about worship in his Indonesian setting.

—Emily R. Brink

RW: Please describe your church in Indonesia.

An Introduction to the Liturgical Year. Text by Inos Biffi, Illustrations by Franco Vignazia. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. 98 pp. $ 17.00

In God's House, compiled and with an introduction by Robert Coles. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. 30 pp. $15.00

Here are two small books that will delight children as well as adults. In both, the full-colorillustrations are not incidental but at least equal to the written text in concept as well as space.

An Advent Sourcebook, edited by Thomas J. O. O'Gorman, with art by Tom Goddard. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1988.170 pp.

A Christmas Sourcebook, edited by Mary Ann Simcoe. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1984. 157 pp.

To Crown the Year: Decorating the Church Year Through the Seasons, by Peter Mazar, withart by Evelyn Grala. Chicago: Liturgy Training Publicaions, 1995.297 pp. $19.00.

A few weeks ago, Bruce Klanderman, organist at the Rochester (N.Y.) Christian Reformed Church, sent me a chart of the number of Psalter Hymnal songs that have moved in his congregation from "red" to "green."

Now for the translation: Two other organists in western Michigan prepared a color-coded chart of the entire 1987 Psalter Hymnal when it first came out.

They marked every song either

Organ Arrangements and Congregational Acts of Worship for the Church Year Based on African American Spirituals. By William Farley Smith. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. Spiral, 112 pp. $17.95